Porn filters have a field day on Horniman Museum

Ooooh, matron!

Regular readers will know that we at El Reg studiously avoid reporting the sort of linguistic mishaps which result in schoolboy-style snickering and utterances of "Ooooh, matron!" in the manner of Kenneth Williams.

Indeed, just last week we managed to completely bypass the sorry tale of a UK couple who christened their baby "Drew Peacock" only to get a very nasty shock when they typed it into Google. Likewise, we have never mentioned the legend of Scunthorpe and the trouble it had with emails and related domain names when they crashed against porn filters ("Who put the c*** in Scunthorpe?" came the cry at the time.)

However, with the news that London's Horniman Museum has itself fallen foul of the electronic net nannies, we now feel that the innuendo-laden news possibilities have reached such a critical mass it would be journalistically irresponsible of us not to deliver the facts, as follows:

According to newsshopper.co.uk, hundreds of Horniman's emails have been discarded by filters and returned to the "horny-man" responsible for their dissemination. So bad have things got that "some schools have even been prevented from accessing the museum's website where a range of educational packages on the Horniman's various collections can be found".

Museum spokesman Antony Watson admitted: "We are currently experiencing some problems with our domain name for email and web traffic. It appears the issue lies with spam filtering software used by a number of internet service providers and web servers. At present, tests are being carried out to work around the situation and we hope the changes we have made to our servers have corrected the issue.

"The blocking of email and web traffic is a frustrating scenario because the Horniman Museum is a much-loved and well respected part of the south London community. Our website is a hugely popular resource of information for educational purposes and it would be a great shame if our visitors had difficulties accessing it."

Agreed. Anyone having trouble accessing the museum's website is invited to alert the institution at enquiry@horniman.ac.uk. Now, if you'll excuse us, we're off to check out some newsworthy saucy surnames from the UK 1901 census. Oooh er missus! ®